It is difficult to know what to say when you lose 0-2 at home to Liverpool. Maybe I should change the subject and comment on the fact that around me, at any rate, there were none of the regular season ticket holders. Did they know in advance that this was going to happen, and so decided not to take up the option of a ticket?
What there was, was someone sitting in my seat who then suggested I could move so she could sit with her friend who had, it seemed bought the seat next to me.
Being ungentlemanly and rather liking the seat that I have in the front row upstairs I declined the offer and they moved away ungraciously, with multiple mutterings and quite possibly a few threats; I am not quite sure.
So there we were watching the spectacle of an Arsenal team playing in white shirts with the number of each player in white on their backs. They had to have that of course since the regulations require that the players’ numbers are on the backs of the shirts. I wonder if they will now change the regulations? White on white indeed! Was that meant to be amusing?
Basically the whole thing wasn’t very amusing – including the 30 plus rows of empty seats in the part of the upper stand reserved for Liverpudlians. I suppose they would argue there was no need to come along since they knew what the result would be. Could the club give them a smaller allocation next time so the two ladies who wanted to sit next to each other would have somewhere to meet their needs?
But it is annoying, when there are thousands of Arsenal supporters who would love to get to a match, not being able to owing to the fact that 20+ rows of seats are left empty because away supporters didn’t want them.
Will there be a rule change? Undoubtedly not. At least not this side of the Second Coming.
As for the match… well what do you want to know? We lost. That’s one win in seven. Last season we had two wins in a run of eight games. And before that a run of no wins in four.
And this seems to be our problem. We can’t have a defeat and shake it off and get back to winning, without going through a whole long stream of other awful results before we get going again.
People are talking about buying another centre forward, and maybe that is what the bossman will do, but the fact is that this side won something like 14 out of the first 15 games (although I may have lost count somewhere within that).
So how can a team that can do that well, do this badly?
The answer is probably also to be found last season when the same thing happened. In fact, as I think in it more and more, my conclusion is that we don’t need to sack any of the team, merely the team psychologist.
Tony Attwood
8/1/24